Saturday, April 27, 2013

The Anti-Liberal University

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) had a wonderful colloquium at the Union League Club. Anne Neal, the head of ACTA, organized the event, and chair was Benno Schmidt, chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees. The audience consisted of trustees like my great friend Candace de Russy, academics, and leaders in the academic reform movement like Greg Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Several leading philanthropists were among the 35 to 40 participants. The speakers included Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School, Neil Hamilton of the University of St. Thomas Law School, and Donald Downs, Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The distinguished group of trustees, donors, activists, and academics engaged in a riveting dialogue. Professor Downs and I have subsequently exchanged some emails about the nature of the university. I emailed him my views on the history of the university: Universities never had a golden age, for they have always been anti-liberal, and the political correctness since the 1980s follows directly from universities' totalitarian roots in Germany. This is what I wrote to Professor Downs:

I agree except for this
question: Was the university ever a liberal institution? Americans
are liberals, and liberalism in America was due to the American people
themselves, neither to the Founding Fathers nor to the Constitution. As they have
been induced to adopt state activism, which by definition is not liberalism
(Louis Hartz notwithstanding; he is brilliant until he gets to FDR), they have
discarded liberalism, and so has the Supreme Court. The university
has contributed to and possibly induced the rejection.

Were American universities ever
liberal institutions? They began in America as Christian colleges; they
were transformed in the late 19th century by Daniel Coit Gilman and
Charles Eliot mimicking German universities. The German universities were
not liberal institutions, as Readings’s* history implies. Their role was
to support the German state. State activist liberalism in America came from
the German universities via the historical school of economics (Wisconsin’s
Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons were pivotal in that regard). The
German historical school had fought with the Austrian school in the 19th
century, and it was ultimately triumphant when one of its last followers,
Werner Sombart, evicted Ludwig von Mises from the German Sociological Society
under the Nazi racial laws (Sombart was old then, and he died a year or two
later).

In other words, I suspect that
from the beginning Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Wisconsin, etc. were formed by
anti-liberal actors; the liberal intonation coopted popular American belief in
liberalism and was context or background to the inner impulse of the
university, which was anti-liberal from the beginning.

People who (a) believe in
liberalism and (b) believe in learning want to believe that there was a golden
age of university liberalism, but I am doubtful. I don’t think the
histories of universities will bear out that belief. It is true that someone
like William Graham Sumner advocated laissez faire at Yale, but the Mugwump,
Gilded-Age period was still one when the university was a Christian
institution. Yale had not evolved into a research-based university until the
end of or after Sumner’s career. There was, I recall, a conflict
involving Ely when he taught at Cornell, which caused him to be fired; he
moved to Michigan before Johns Hopkins and Wisconsin. That was still during the
Mugwump period, and as Progressivism became ascendant the AAUP adopted the
principles of academic freedom based on liberal rhetoric. But the
AAUP and universities themselves were Progressive institutions; in a sense,
they were the source of Progressivism. The rise of Progressivism during
the 1890-1920 period (I would argue we are still in the age of Progressivism)
followed directly from the influence of the German university on America.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.